Cocktails will be served on the Veranda! This is our Boma or round hut at the game reserve. We gathered each day at 4PM for a glass of the red stuff before our game drive. The view was quite good and the 800mm lens with a 1.4 tele-extender was better then my 12X binocs.

It's Mr. and Mrs. Giraffe! The reserve has 2 giraffes, a male and a female and she is very pregnant right now. Giraffes are most fascinating. They give birth standing up and the baby has to fall to the ground at about a meter or more. They believe that this helps the baby caugh out the fluids from being in the womb. Giraffes only sleep betwee 10 minuts to 2 hours a day and eat most of the rest of the time. They have a complex set of one way valves in their neck arteries to push blood upstream from the heart and conversly to reduce blood pressure to the brain when they bend down to eat plants near the ground. Without this their brains would literally explode from the blood pressure. Their tounge is about 18-20 inches long and can easily stip leaves from even the most thorny plants. These giraffes were the southern species and average between 1.5 to 2 tons and around 3 meters in height. The larger species that live in Kenya can reach 18-20 ft in height because the trees are taller there. They are vey docile and I imagine if you had enough food for them they would make a cool kind of pet!

Leo the lion.

What can I say, I'm a Leo so I love these images! When I first reviewed these images the night after I took them I was glad I made the effort to bring along that big 800mm lens! It was a hassle but worth it. We found the lions at their watering hole and it was a hot day so he had a drink.

Mrs. Lion has a bath...

I love her eyes. And the tounge looks the same as any tabby. By the way, I've cleaned these up in Photoshop and sized them for the web but they are not cropped in any way. We were only about 30-40 feet away from them at the watering hole.

These lions were raised for canned hunts. Those are the kind of hunt where some wealthy prick pays a lot of money and gets to shoot a lion that has been cage raised. They were rescued by The Born Free Foundation and because they were never out in the wild too much they must be fed by the reserve. They are typically given a dead cow or horse or something else along that line. They are neutered because they would not be able to train their young to survive. The male doesn't seem to know he is fixed and he enjoys his sessions with the females. By the way, when non-neutered lions do mate and a female is fertile the male can mate up to 75 times in a 24 hour period! A real Cassanova!

Poodle!

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Happy Hippo ...

Are they trainable, because I just had an idea for a unique gutter cleaning service.

Wait... oh, you mean rain gutters, eve troughs. I was thinking gutters as next to the sidewalk, which would be too low for them. :o
One people divided by a language.

Perhaps if you grew some thorny Acacia in the muck in your gutters it might work.

Wow! Thanks for sharing Chris!! :)

For perspective, how big(long) are those thorns? :eek:
Is that an ant on one?

Me too! They're all incredible though...

he has a gift

and a telephoto lens. And he's not afraid to use it.